Denza Z driven: First taste of China's £173k, 1584bhp 911 rival

Under the Italianate bodywork (for which we can credit BYD Design Director Wolfgang Egger; Alfa Romeo 8C, etc) sits BYD’s ‘e3’ (pronounced ‘E Cube’) platform, however - shared with the larger Denza Z9 GT shooting brake.

That means the car has a unitary chassis ‘gigacasting’ (like a 911) rather than a monocoque ‘tub’ (like a supercar). The chassis makes room for one of BYD’s second-generation LFP ‘blade’ battery packs, worth 76kWh, within it; which works as a stressed part of it, and contributes to impressive torsional rigidity - albeit perhaps not the kind of low kerbweight you might expect of a sports car (2250kg).

Denza will offer three versions: Coupe, convertible Spider, and track-ready Racing (a special edition, engineered ostensibly to win the Nordschliefe lap record for production EVs back from the Manthey-kit Porsche Taycan Turbo GT, will also be made, but in very small numbers). They are priced from £142,900, £159,900 and £172,900, respectively, putting the Z squarely in Carrera 4 GTS territory (for want of a more technically similar reference point) and making this comfortably the most expensive car China has yet put on our shores.

In advance of the car’s public debut at the Goodwood Festival of Speed this week, Denza graciously afforded us one flying lap of Goodwood circuit as a preliminary test; with an instructor in the passenger seat making sure we didn’t exceed its ‘recommended speed limit’, or experiment with the drive modes.

For that lap, we did at least get the Racing version, which uses steel coil suspension in replacement of the air springs of other models; magnetorheological dampers, too; and will be available with proper circuit-appropriate semi-slick tyres (although ours didn’t have those).

The test didn’t include much time for detailed impressions of the cabin. The driver’s seat felt quite softly padded, and a little short on purposeful support for a track-intended model. For a sports car, it could have been lower-set. The wider cabin contents looked and felt a little plasticky, in some places, given what you might expect for a six-figure price tag; but nothing was particularly, conspicuously cheap.

After a warm-up lap, Goodwood circuit gives you only four or five places where you can open the accelerator wide; which isn’t many when you’ve got nearly 1600 horsepower to account for. I’m not fully convinced that the Denza Z felt quite that powerful.

The car has surprisingly progressive power delivery, seemingly feeding torque through gradually. To me, it didn’t quite seem to have that really titanic, super-linear throttle feel of other 1000bhp+ EVs I’ve tested -despite working up a very rapid head of steam in any case. This may have been because the car's road tyres couldn't transmit the necessary traction on track, and the car's governing electronics were dampening its responses.

By sports car standards, the Z also seemed to lack a little bit of simple agility and willingness to change direction, perhaps on account of its heft. The car’s tri-motor powertrain felt a little reigned in and closely governed by its electronics. It didn’t seem able to rotate the car with power, or add much directional impetus to the car’s handling; in the default driving mode in which we were able to test it, at least.